This field activity asks students to examine and interpret a given environmental site where a disturbance (fallen tree, beaver dam etc.) has taken place.

Students are assigned unique roles and work independently to solve a complex problem from the perspective of their role (i.e. sociologist, educator, historian, etc.) Students then work collaboratively to present their findings and action plan to the "tribal council".

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This activity is meant to follow a lesson about world or international agriculture. It gives the students an understanding of exports, imports, and trade embargos by using M&M’s as agricultural products. By Katie Griffith, Nebraska Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources educator

In this activity, students graph and analyze methane data, extracted from an ice core, to examine how atmospheric methane has changed over the past 109,000 years in a case study format. Calculating the rate of change of modern methane concentrations, they compare the radiative forcing of methane and carbon dioxide and make predictions about the future, based on what they have learned from the data and man's role in that future.

This textbook provides the novice learner with a foundational understanding of Canada’s 2019 Food Guide and Food Labelling. It highlights important considerations for future health professionals seeking to adopt the new food guide into their practice, including strategies towards healthy eating. This open textbook underscores a relational inquiry approach to inform discussions with clients about nutrition and healthy eating.

Short Description:
This textbook provides the novice learner with a foundational understanding of Canada’s 2019 Food Guide and Food Labelling. It highlights important considerations for future health professionals seeking to adopt the new food guide into their practice, including strategies towards healthy eating. This open textbook underscores a relational inquiry approach to inform discussions with clients about nutrition and healthy eating.

Word Count: 9277

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically as part of a bulk import process by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided. As a result, there may be errors in formatting.)

This video segment from NOVA: "The Sea Behind the Dunes" explores the community of organisms that exists in the New England tidal marsh.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The intestinal tract is home to a variety of microbes that live in a delicate balance with their host. Although this symbiosis is well-studied for bacteria, gut fungi (mycobiota) are often neglected due to their lower abundance in the gut microbiome. While fungi are traditionally investigated using culture-dependent methods, next-generation sequencing has allowed for more in-depth understanding. Fungi may colonize the gut as soon as birth, and the gut mycobiota can be affected by many factors throughout life, such as the environment, diet and nutrition, and the seasons. Gut fungi regulate many physiological functions in their hosts, including metabolism, control of aging, and disease progression. Immune homeostasis, in particular, is linked to gut mycobiota, and fungi can affect both innate and adaptive immune responses in the gut. Gut mycobiota have also been linked with intestinal diseases, and imbalanced fungal community composition can alter intestinal homeostasis..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This Open Educational Resource was designed to provide a four-field introduction to anthropology for undergraduate courses. This course was created through the cumulative efforts of the Department of Anthropology at IUP as a reflection of their teaching and experiences as a collective.

As instructors of both undergraduate and graduate students alike, the professors in the Anthropology Department hope that students use this book to further their knowledge and understanding of anthropology and apply it in their everyday lives and the world around them.

IUP's Introduction to Anthropology: A Holistic and Applied Approach to Being Human is a 4-field text designed to provide students and instructors with a quality, peer-reviewed free resource that depicts a diversity of perspectives, approaches, and topics related to sociocultural anthropology, biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology.

Consisting of a robust series of 20 modules, the IUP OER covers topics from the history of North American anthropology, cultural and archaeological methods, the origins of humans and our earliest ancestors, the development of agriculture, race and ancestry, sex and gender, kinship, religion, climate change, and human rights and social issues—providing faculty flexibility with topics covered in a typical 15-week semester.

Designed to help students engage more meaningfully with each topic and develop as critical thinkers, the OER includes:

review and assessment questions
discussion prompts
class activities
relevant videos
glossaries
suggested readings
allowing students to dive further into topics no matter their preferred method of learning.

We are proud to host an interactive, digital version of the OER, created through the Articulate platform. We are also rolling out a physical version of the text, published through Amazon's KDP (stay tuned for the link).

Authored by the faculty in IUP's Department of Anthropology, this OER arose from a commitment to provide high-quality resources to all students. We combined the best aspects of our introductory course and teaching to create a robust resource that can be used in any introductory, 4-field anthropology course. Our own applied experiences are integrated into the course materials, as well as those from a range of professional anthropologists (isotopes and kinship studies, indigenous archaeology, forensic anthropology and the race problem, medical anthropology, and a linguistic anthropological analysis of food and power relationships in the prison system, among others!). The result is a resource that provides multiple lenses to tackle common introductory topics while showing students the myriad possibilities of what it looks like to be an anthropologist. Contact us for a LMS package to integrate the course into a Learning Management System.

Senior Authors:
Andrea Palmiotto
Lara Homsey-Messer
Benjamin Ford
Amanda Poole
Abigail Adams
Francis Allard
William Chadwick

Other Contributors
Allysha Winburn, University of West Florida
Alexander Martín, Center for Comparative Archaeology, University of Pittsburgh
Desireé Reneé Martinez, Cogstone Resource Management
Jelmer Davis, University of California, Davis
Anastasia Hudgins, Ethnologica
Sandhyak Narayanan, University of Nevada, Reno
Rachel Horowitz, Washington State University
Lori Labotka, Knoxville, TN
Bridget Roddy, IUP
Ashley Nagle, IUP
Sonja Rossi-Williams, IUP

This OER was made possible through grants from PA GOAL and the IUP Center for Teaching Excellence.

The purpose of this resource is to introduce the process of benchmarking in farming. It is a very basic tutorial aimed at familiarizing farmers with the practice of benchmarking in farm management. This resource hope to encourage learners to research further learning resources and opportunities. The content of this resource is derived from:

Kahan, D. (2013). Farm business analysis using benchmarking. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The discipline of Biosystems Engineering emerged in the 1990s from the traditional strongholds of agricultural engineering and food engineering. Biosystems engineering integrates engineering science and design with applied biological, environmental, and agricultural sciences. Introduction to Biosystems Engineering is targeted at 1st and 2nd year university-level students with an interest in biosystems engineering but who are not yet familiar with the breadth and depth of the subject. It is designed as a coherent educational resource, also available for download as individual digital chapters. The book can be used as a localized, customizable text for introductory courses in Biosystems Engineering globally. It is written as a series of stand-alone chapters organized under six major topics: Food and Bioprocessing; Environment; Buildings and Infrastructure; Information and Communications Technology and Data; Machinery Systems; and Energy. Each chapter is organized around stated learning outcomes and describes key concepts, applications of the concepts, and worked examples.

In this introduction to biotechnology's use in agriculture, learners will discuss history of the topic, model the fermentation process, and extract DNA in a lab activity.

As technology becomes ever integrated into our food system and everyday life, our food industry and supply become ever more vulnerable to attack. Cyber attacks continue to threaten large and small companies, government agencies, individuals, and food and agriculture. This module, ‘Securing the Food Industry,’ aims to introduce the idea of cyberbiosecurity through a lecture format along with three case studies allowing students to interact and think through the concepts and materials. This module was built for implementation into college level courses with connection or interest in the food industry, food science, and agriculture as well as and technology courses focused on real world applications.
The lecture starts by introducing the amount of technology in food science and the food industry then transitions into concerns about security. After discussing multiple subtypes of security already integrated into the food industry, cyberbiosecurity is introduced. The term and definition are discussed before the categories of cyber attacks are introduced. The lecture relates these ideas back to the food industry before sharing a few real-life examples of detrimental cyber-attacks. The lecture concludes are explain the impact a cyber attack can cause, who is responsible for preventing and recovering from these attacks, as well as suggested practices to reduce vulnerabilities. Three theoretical but realistic case studies with discussion questions follow the lecture. These studies were written to act as small group discussion starters but could be used for whole class discussion, individual writing assignments, or other applications.
A list of additional resources can be found with the course material. This list provides a small sampling of additional documents which discuss cyberbiosecurity. The resources listed at the end of the lecture are not included in the additional resources document but also provide helpful information in the exploration and understanding of cyberbiosecurity. Food science resources are also included in this document to provide additional background around the food industry portion of this course material.

Securing the Food Industry is an open educational resource (OER). Instructors reviewing, adopting, or adapting the module should indicate their interest at https://forms.gle/orFRGhYs8owBP7gD6.

The advent of electronics has had a profound impact on our lives and impacted nearly every product that we use either directly or indirectly. Without electronics, present day computers, cell phones, stereos, televisions, and the internet would not be possible. And of course, without computers and modern communications tools, society could not have made the huge strides in fields such as medicine, aerospace technologies, meteorology, transportation, agriculture, education, and many others. It is for these reasons that the invention of the transistor is considered as one of the most important technological advancements in history.

Focusing primarily on the period since 1500, explores the influence of climate, topography, plants, animals, and microorganisms on human history and the reciprocal influence of people on the environment. Topics include the European encounter with the Americas, the impact of modern technology, and the historical roots of the current environmental crisis.

Previously infectious diseases previously caused the majority of ill-health and premature death globally, but in high- and middle-income countries during the 20.th century infectious diseases – with the exception of HIV – declined. Introduction of hygiene and discovery of microbes and later vaccines an antibiotics contributed to the decline, but changing living conditions with better housing, nutrition, water and sanitation were the main drivers of infectious diseases’ decline.

This session will expand the student´s knowledge about human health and quality of life in the context of global and local ecology. Examples will be provided on how environmental management and development influence human health. The session provide an overview of the disease burden attributable to the environment, and much of this burden is placed across different geographical regions of the world. Examples will be presented on the impacts of poor quality water, insufficient access to water, lack of appropriate sanitation and poor personal hygiene. Other examples of environmental health factors included relate to reduced forest cover, unsustainable agricultural production systems, climate change, and poor management of natural resources that significantly influence livelihood, food security and migration patterns.

The newborn or neonatal period relates to children during the first 28 days of life. This session will explore how really simple and low cost interventions at high coverage could save the life of a large proportion of newborn children. During the past two decades, we have seen a dramatic improvement in child survival. In 1990, almost 13 million children died every year. Today, this number has reduced by more than half
to below six million. This is the result of an increasing number of people gaining access to clean water,
vaccination, education, nutrition, and health care. Learn more by watching this video.
Get transcript for video here: https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/module/58789/overview

This video is about interactions between nutritional deficiencies and infections in low-income settings. First, the typical diet in low-income countries, and the most common micronutrient deficiencies will be described, and basic concepts about the malnutrition-infection cycle will be introduced. Then the role of iron, zinc and vitamin A in relation to childhood infections will be discussed. Finally, students will hear about the need for nutritional support to patients with TB and HIV patients.

Good nutrition is crucuial to achieve good health in all ages, but especially in the youngest ones.
Get transcript for video here: https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/module/58789/overview